Supreme Court hears home-health aide case

By Matthew Heimer

Home-health aides who care for the elderly and disabled belong to one of the nation’s fastest-growing job categories—and do some of the toughest jobs. But an attempt by the state of Illinois to boost pay for health aides has been caught up in a wider legal battle over public employees’ right to opt out of union membership. That fight has now reached the Supreme Court , which heard arguments yesterday in the case, Harris v. Quinn. (Read a transcript of the arguments here.)

Shutterstock

Higher wages and union dues may go hand-in-hand.

The case has more to do with the politics of labor than with the economics of caring for seniors. In brief: Opponents of the Illinois law and others like it object that they force public-sector employees to pay union dues that could be used to support political causes that the employees don’t agree with—a potential violation of their First Amendment rights. But some of the details of the case illustrate the legal and financial gray area where many home-health workers operate.

In the mid-2000s, Illinois authorized home-health care workers who were paid through the state’s Medicaid program to join a union; most voted in favor of doing so. (Some lower-income retirees qualify for Medicaid coverage, as do many disabled people.) Since then, as NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported this week, the average health aide’s wage in Illinois has nearly doubled, to $13 an hour from $7 an hour, and many full-time aides have health insurance.

Under “fair share” rules that are common in unionized workplaces, even employees who don’t wish to be represented by a union are required to pay union fees. And that’s where the quirks of elder care are feeding the Illinois conflict: A not-insignificant minority of the people considered home-health “employees” under the law are actually relatives of the people they’re caring for. Some of the plaintiffs in Harris fall into this category: They don’t consider themselves to be professional caregivers, but in order to get reimbursed for care by Medicaid, they have to join the state’s program and pay union dues.

As many Supreme Court reporters, including The Wall Street Journal’s Jess Bravin and Melanie Trottman, are noting this week, anti-union activists are using this seemingly narrow case as a platform for mounting a broader challenge, arguing that public-sector unions of all stripes should be barred from collecting dues from dissenting workers. The union, meanwhile, is putting the focus on the human-interest side of the story. As one wheelchair-bound Chicagoan told Totenberg, “I had a personal assistant come to me at 5 o’clock in the morning in my house… not because I’m lovely, but because she gets a really good wage, and the wage came from the unions being able to collectively bargain.”

About Encore

Encore looks at the changing nature of retirement, from new rules and guidelines for financial security to the shifting identities, needs and priorities of people saving for and living in retirement. Our lead blogger is editor Matthew Heimer, and frequent contributors include editor Amy Hoak, writer Catey Hill, and MarketWatch columnists Elizabeth O’Brien, Robert Powell and Andrea Coombes. Encore also features regular commentary from The Wall Street Journal retirement columnists Glenn Ruffenach and Anne Tergesen and the Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Alicia H. Munnell.